"And if I can't go down in history as a good president then I'll settle for not being a bad one. That's what I want. Prisoner Zero risked his life to try to kill me, so that's what he wants. Now what do you want?"

"My version of what you just said," said Paula. "To be good at this job. Not to screw up. Not to end up with another divorce."

"You guys having trouble?"

"Only the usual," Paula said. "The hours are too long. We're never in the same city at the same time. We buy breast fillet, sugar snap peas and portobello mushrooms every Friday evening and throw the lot out a week later because even when we're both there neither of us has the time, energy or slightest inclination to cook."

"I'm sorry."

Paula sighed. "It gets worse," she said. "Mike's having an affair."

The President had known Paula for most of her life. That was one of the reasons why Paris had been such a mistake. He could still remember the girl she'd been, a spindly army brat off to college. Their families had known each other and the President knew she wasn't telling him. She was telling the late twenty-something he'd been back then. Old enough to give advice and not so old it was like talking to someone's father.

"God," Gene Newman said, "when did Mike tell you?"

"He didn't."

He looked at her then.

"Oh yeah," Paula said. "I'm completely compromised."

"You had him followed?"

Her nod was slight.

"By someone you trust?"

"Every day, with my life."

Which had to mean the Puerto Rican woman waiting anxiously in an area now reserved for the bodyguards of those visiting. One of the First Lady's more interesting ideas.

"Felicia?"

Another nod.

"Who is Mike seeing?"

"One of your staff."

The President sighed. "You probably shouldn't have told me that," he said. "You want me to end it?"

"How?"

"I'm sure we need an ambassador somewhere. You stay, Mike goes... You can write the closing script nearer the time. Meanwhile think about redeploying Felicia. Make it a promotion."

"And me?"

"You?" The President tipped his head to one side.

"Should I expect to be redeployed?"

"No." Gene Newman shook his head. "This job belongs to you for as long as you want it." He was working on the basis that Paula knew she'd got the job in spite of what happened in Paris and not because of it...

"Paula was here." The First Lady's comment was not a question.

"You're right," said the President. "So she was."

"And that's why you're sitting in the dark?"

"It's the overload of caffeine."

The First Lady looked around at the sitting room. "Did Paula have anything interesting to say?"

"The man who tried to shoot me had been listening to the rain."

"I can think of better reasons."

"Yes. I'm sure you can."

"Is Paula about to become one of them?"

"No," said Gene Newman, and there was a firmness to his voice which his wife hadn't heard in months. Being shot at seemed to agree with him.

CHAPTER 10

Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 11 [The Future]

It was one of the more elegant ironies of immortality that memory could be captured within the lattice of a diamond and that this lattice could be produced by burning and compressing the body from which that memory was taken.

Zaq wore all of the emperors who'd gone before him on his cloak and their memories were his memories, their ennui and hatreds were his also, as were their passions, loves and foibles. It made for a complicated sense of self and some days he would forget who he was and think of himself as just another memory.

An actor in an old-style Beijing opera with a cast of one and an audience of billions.

Other days were different, sometimes very different. On the morning of his fifteenth birthday Zaq decided he was alone, that the audience didn't really exist and never had, he was alone in a pavilion with an uncertain and ever-changing number of rooms, surrounded by smooth-faced eunuchs, almond-eyed concubines, ponytailed warrior guards...

All beautiful in their way, all elegant, all fake. As fake as the ambassadors in their city beyond the purple walls.

He was alone.

Zaq found it next to impossible to believe that no other emperor had realized this, so he skimmed their diamonds faster than was safe and ended up on his knees in a corridor, watched by a Manchu guard, vomiting soft-shelled crab onto pink marble. He had been right, though; none of them had realized.

"If it is a truth."

The voice in his head came on his seventeenth birthday, in the evening when hunger was no longer quite so amusing and Zaq was beginning to wonder if he should have sent all his guards away. Retaining one of them might have made sense, except then he wouldn't have been alone and being alone was what this was about.

"Well," Zaq demanded. "Is it true?"

Even as a child he'd spoken rarely to the Librarian, preferring to trust in himself. Nothing in the years which had passed had changed his mind.

"That depends."

Surprise me, thought Zaq.

"Remember that concubine?"

Of course he did. The long blade still lay on the tiles, covered with dust and surrounded by bits of its broken handle. His room had remained his alone since that morning, untidied and inviolate, four years' worth of dirt crusting the floor and griming carved panels until the dragon frieze around the wall looked as if it had been painted with velvet.

"The girl died."

"She wasn't alive in the first place," Zaq said.

"Starvation," said the Librarian. "She starved herself to death in the Restful Gardens."

"In the what?"

A map of the Purple City came into his mind and then Zaq realized it wasn't a map at all, it was an aerial view, showing the three state pavilions, slung out along a north-south axis, with his own quarters, three identical but smaller pavilions to the north of these.

And to the north again, carved out of a sprawl of lesser pavilions, gates and temples was a walled garden he'd forgotten was even there. On the grass, next to a mulberry bush, lay a girl, her eyes closed and hair freed from the pins which had held it in place.

"You know," said Zaq, as he bent to retrieve the dusty blade. "I could have saved you the trouble." Checking its weight, Zaq brought the blade up, waited on the moment and tossed it lightly at the wall, hitting a silk hanging of some mountain pool, the kind with a path skirting the water's edge and a small wooden bridge on which stood two children.

The only thing remotely unusual about the hanging was that rain sleeted from the top left corner, endless stitches of drizzle.

"Was that necessary?"

"You can mend it," Zaq said. "Hell, just make another..."

The Librarian shook its head. There was no other way Zaq could describe the feeling.

"Why not?"

"Because everything in this room is original."

"Including me?"

The Librarian sighed.

That evening rain lashed the Ambassadors' City, flooding a thousand pavilions and forcing fifty to be abandoned completely. It fell at a slant, roughly left to right, and whole districts which had never been anything but temperate found themselves cowering under slate-grey skies and wondering if the sleet would ever end.

Such weather was rare. In fact, even the cold immortals who made a point of knowing everything had to admit that a storm such as this was unknown. It was understood, because this was taught as a fact of verifiable truth on all 2023 worlds, that life around Star One relied for its very existence on the presence of the Chuang Tzu.

No emperor/no climate, the equation was that simple.

Few alive could still remember the arrival of the first colony ships. Immortality had been perfected, at least in its non-biological forms, but insufficient attention had been paid to the boredom of eternity and the corrosive nature of the ratchet effect which demanded ever sharper, stronger and more intense sensations to maintain something like the same level of satisfaction.